I have a connection with John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who in 1949 murdered Olive Durrand-Deacon. He was held in a Horsham police station before a hearing in the town hall. Haigh murdered six people that was confirmed but he claimed more, dissolving the bodies in sulphuric acid in a large oil drum.

Bramber Castle is situated at the west of the tiny village of Bramber, near Steyning in West Sussex. Built by William De Braose around 1171, it was the administrative centre for the rape of Bramber. I walk around the remains of the bailey and climb the motte, and later plunge into the defensive ditch that […]

Cowdray House in Midhurst, West Sussex, was a Tudor nobleman’s grand mansion, built around 1520 and 1542. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I visited and stayed there, no doubt hunting in the local hazel wood forest. The house was a near copy of Hampton Court, although not quite as big. No one was permitted to have […]

The UK is filled with strange oddities. Take for example the red-brick remains of a roofless church in West Sussex tucked away in a small hamlet called Bedham. Once home to woodcutters and charcoal burners the woodland is now a nature reserve open to the public. The tiny community that lived here for generations after […]

The Bald Explorer is off in search of the smallest church in Sussex. Lullington Church, part of Cuckmere Churches, is tiny, only 16 feet square. It is a hidden gem in the East Sussex countryside on the South Downs. Used now for as the backdrop for weddings, it still has regular services for the community. […]

My job, if you can call it that, with the Bald Explorer programmes, is to look back in history and follow a story from the past with the perspective of today. In other words, I am retracing the steps of people or things that have gone before us, whether they are the smugglers on the […]